A New Museum Dedicated to Picasso and Giacometti Is Launching in Beijing Next Year

Two of Europe’s most famous
artists—Picasso and Giacometti—will be the subject of a new museum
opening in Beijing in 2020.

Paris’s National Picasso Museum
and the Giacometti Foundation are teaming up to manage the new
institution for at least the first five years, from June 2020
through June 2025. (After that, they may extend the partnership or
hand the museum over to Chinese management.) The institution will
present up to four exhibitions each year. 

“This unprecedented
collaboration with China is part of an international outreach
initiative initiated by these two major French collections,” the
project’s partners said in a statement provided to Artnet News.
“This project is an exceptional opportunity to present two of the
greatest artists of the 20th century to the Chinese public in a
sustainable way.”

An agreement of intent was first
signed during the summer by the two French museums and the
Beijing-based Sevenstar group, which runs Beijing’s 798CubeProject
space, an art museum designed by Zhu Pei in Beijing’s 798 Art
District. A final contract was signed in the presence of the French
culture minister Franck Riester yesterday, November 5.

“This collaborative project is
unique because it is not an exhibition project but a long-term
project,” Catherine Grenier, the director of the Giacometti
Foundation, said. “It is very important when you create a
friendship that it lasts. We will remain united for a long
time.”

The first exhibition at the new
museum will, unsurprisingly, be dedicated to the 20th-century
heavyweights. A spokesperson for the Giacometti Foundation says it
is still “early days” and was unable to hint at what will be
included in the inaugural show, but the two museums staged an
exhibition dedicated to the pairing in 2016. That show included
more than 200 artworks, including Picasso’s seminal
Paul en Arlequin
(1924) and Giacometti’s
Femme qui marche
(1932). 

The 2016 show also unveiled an
important new body of research revealing an unknown relationship
between the two artists, who first met in the early 1930s and,
despite having a 20-year age difference, formed a strong bond,
writing to each other often about their artistic creations and
arguing over the return of realism after World War II.

“This is the first time that a
national museum has partnered with a private foundation to bring
such a project to life,” Laurent Le Bon, the president of the
National Picasso Museum, said in a statement over the
summer. 

The project is bound to find an
eager audience. China is the world’s third-largest art market after
the US and the UK, and there has been a huge surge in interest in
Picasso following the first major retrospective of the artist’s
work at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art over the summer, which
was organized in partnership with the Picasso Museum. That show
drew around 300,000 people, making it the most-attended in the
museum’s 12-year history. 

The new Picasso-Giacometti
project is also far from the only French-Chinese cultural
collaboration underway. In October, the Rodin Museum revealed plans
to open an outpost in Shenzhen and the Centre Pompidou x West Bund
project in Shanghai was inaugurated by French president Emmanuel
Macron earlier this week.

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Launching in Beijing Next Year appeared first on artnet
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